Cultural Co-operation

Cultural Co-operation has sought to help ordinary Londoners make sense of this fast-changing, often bewildering, landscape; to become aware of - and rejoice in - its creative possibilities; and to reach beyond the confines of their inherited preconceptions to embrace the unfamiliar with open arms, not reject it with fear and hatred. Cultural Co-ope... ration was established in 1987 by my late colleague Robert Atkins and I after we had initiated and managed the Commonwealth Institute's Arts Centre from 1980 to 1987. The official closure of the Arts Centre by the second Thatcher government in 1987 cut off in its prime a programme of international cultural projects - annual music festivals, theatre and film seasons, exhibitions, talks and seminars - developed over the previous seven years and based on the popular traditions of the Commonwealth's forty-five or so non-Western countries. Our 1986-87 Arts Centre programme represented the pinnacle of our achievement at the Institute: we raised £1.5 million from the public and private sectors to mount both a year-long Caribbean Focus - an international programme featuring 400 visiting artists and artworks from all over the Caribbean presented throughout the UK - and the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Edinburgh. Sadly, the original line-up for this festival, a breathtaking 1200 artists from fifty countries, was decimated by an anti-UK boycott caused by the then British Government's perceived support of the Apartheid regime. Despite this, many elements of the festival survived. It closed with a triumphant Anti-Apartheid concert performed in front of thousands in Prince's Street Gardens.Read More